This year's winning images in Nikon's Small World photomicrography contest are arguably the best in the competition's 36 years. They cover everything from bug eyes and spider fur to starfish embyros and mouse neurons.

I had the honor of being one of the judges for this year's competition. We spent an entire day in May poring over 2,200 images (a record for Nikon) to find the best, which were posted on the Nikon Small World website today. The winning order won't be revealed until Oct. 13, but in the meantime, you can choose your favorite and help determine the winner of the public vote.

Though the judges were blown away by a few of the more exotic photo subjects, some of the most interesting images were microscopic views of ordinary stuff like soy sauce and soap bubbles. I've gathered some of the best of these in this gallery.

The orange koi carp weighs 30lb - the same as an average three-year-old girl - and is thought to be one of the largest of its kind ever captured.

It took Raphael Biagini ten minutes to reel the creature out of a lake in the south of France - moments after fellow anglers told him they had spent six years trying to snare the legendary 'giant goldfish'.

Mr Biagini, pictured, said: 'To begin with, we couldn't tell what was at the end of the line, but we knew it was big.

Detail for Event ID 25330x Case Number: 25330 Log Number: US-09072010-0010 Submitted Date: 2010-09-07 16:30 GMT Event Date: 2010-09-06 00:00 GMT Status: Assigned City: Eugene Region: Oregon Country: US Longitude: -123.0867536 Latitude: 44.0520691 Shape: Flash Vallee Index: CE4 Description: I am a student here in Eugene, Oregon. I have my GED and I'm studying to become a computer programmer. (I used to work at Subway) The events I'm about to describe to you are real, and I didn't make them up. About 2 years ago I started noticing subtle ambiguous coincidences on radio and other media happening. Creatine in particular stood our as having weird effects. First let me tell you I've been a poster on aspiesforfreedom.org and I think theres a direct link between schizophrenia / autism and these so called alien abductions. I've actually studied a lot about the mental illness Schizophrenia before the events took place. About a year and a half ago I was at home aligning crystals to my chakra centers for the heck of it. I wanted to see if these chakra points would do anything if I placed the stones on them. At this same time I was taking pregnenolone, DHEA, and probably creatine as supplements. The first UFO sighting I had was after eating dinner at my house. I went outside and I saw a blue flash of light hit the ground a few feet in front of me. After I went back inside my house I hopped on Facebook.com at about 8pm pacific time and I started hearing voices chanting someones name. I woke up the next morning and the person's name had changed. The next thing I did was report this event to mufon's ufo network. I know you're probably thinking "Hey he's nuts" And I have been comitted to a mental hospital for this very reason. In fact I've grown to accept it as a mental Illness despite having aliens wake me up at night in my dreams. Let me tell you guys (It's not just sleep paralysis). If you've ever had the experience of waking up at night, and not being able to move then you know what sleep paralysis is like. Well I'm here to tell you that it IS NOT JUST SLEEP PARAYLYSIS like they're saying! Don't believe the lies... anyway... Back to the story. The voices first told me they were witches, then lucifer star of the morning, and then aliens. Look all I know is that there strong and they're harassing me.

NEW YORK -- Australia and New Zealand share first place, and the United States is tied for fifth, in a first-of-its kind survey ranking 153 nations on the willingness of their citizens to donate time and money to charity.

China ranks near the bottom, barely above last-place Madagascar.

The report was released Wednesday by the British-based Charities Aid Foundation. Its overall rankings were a composite of three categories - the percentage of people who donated money, donated time and helped a stranger in the month prior to being surveyed.

Australia and New Zealand topped the index with a score of 57 percent, trailed by Canada, Ireland, the United States and Switzerland.

Several major nations were near the bottom, including India, Russia and China.

MOSCOW — A car loaded with explosives detonated in a central market in Russia’s restive North Caucasus region on Thursday, killing at least 15 people and wounding more than 100 in what authorities said was likely a suicide attack.

The blast occurred in North Ossetia, a mostly Orthodox Christian area where major acts of violence have been rare in recent years compared with majority Muslim republics in the region, such as Chechnya or Dagestan, where just last weekend a suicide bomber killed three people at a military installation.

In Thursday’s attack, a suicide bomber set off an explosive device packed with bolts, ball bearings and other shrapnel while sitting in a parked car close to the main entrance of the crowded central market in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, investigators from the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement.

Video from the scene showed charred human remains protruding from a mangled car that appeared to have been torn in half by the blast. The force of the explosion blew out windows, damaged cars and scattered refuse of twisted metal, burnt produce and body parts.

“I was sitting and talking and suddenly there was an explosion,” a witness told Russia’s Vesti television. “We went outside and people were lying there dead.”

Police disarmed a second explosive device found near the market entrance, and Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee warned that other bombs could be set to detonate in the vicinity, Russian media reported.

Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, said the bombing, which occurred as the country’s sizeable Muslim population was celebrating the end of the holy month of Ramadan, was aimed at sowing interethnic discord. He called on Russia’s Muslims to aid in the effort to quash extremism. “Those who do this are people without souls or hearts,” he said. “For them nothing is sacred. We expect that above all Muslim population of Russia to make a decisive contribution to this fight.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, though North Ossetia has previously been the target of militants from Muslim regions in the North Caucasus.

Last month, a suicide attack on a police checkpoint close to the border with Ingushetia killed one police officer. Another suicide attack in 2008 at a bus stop in Vladikavkaz, killed about a dozen people.

And in 2004, militants from neighboring Chechnya seized a school in the North Ossetian city of Beslan, taking more than 1,000 people hostage, including hundreds of children. More than 300 people were killed when explosions rocked the school and Russian forces raided it.

A local police source told the Interfax news agency that the car involved in Thursday’s attack had a license plate from neighboring Ingushetia, a violence-plagued region that has had a tense relationship with North Ossetia. In the early 1990s a bloody ethnic conflict erupted in the border area between the regions.

The Kremlin has struggled to contain a weakened, though still potent insurgency in the North Caucasus, which followed two wars fought in Chechnya, but which experts now say is fed by a combination of Islamic militancy, poverty, corruption and fighting between clans.

In recent years, the violence has spread from Chechnya to other regions of the North Caucasus and beyond. In March, two female suicide bombers from Dagestan attacked the Moscow subway, killing 40 people.

As a collaboration between the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation, ‘Preventable’ and the District of West Vancouver, the optical speed control experiment is in effect. The campaign is a staggering motion to target to distracted drivers, especially during back-to-school season.

Imagine the heart attack that would result from nearly hitting a child on the road. This is precisely the magnitude of scare the City of Vancouver would like to instill with their optical speed control project. Stretched images of children will be painted onto residential streets to give the illusion of a real kid on front of your moving car. I’m sure everyone in Vancouver will soon be on his guard.